Cool's Ridge Read online

  “Dining porch.”

  “Oh. Heavens, I thought you said dying porch. I thought, strange people with strange phrases.”

  “Strange, but not that strange.”

  “So you’re not going to start law school this summer!”

  “No. I’ve been teaching since college and I’m sick of academic life.”

  “Not a good sign.”

  “I don’t know. Is it a bad sign?”

  “It’s just that I’ve heard this before: ‘What am I going to do with my life?’”

  “I’m twenty-five, not forty-five. How did you decide what you wanted to do?”

  “Oh, my. That’s so long ago I’m not sure I remember.”

  “You just drifted into law school?”

  She laughed. “Maybe. Well, no, of course not. Let’s see, how did all that come about? It had something to do with your father. We had a difference of opinion on a constitutional issue and I got interested in looking things up. Huh. What was it? Anyway, what about Skip?”

  “You mean me and Skip?”

  She made a face. “English major! My God.”

  “Skip and I! Well, I don’t know about that either. If you’re getting the impression my life is up in the air, you’re right. Kee-rect, as Grampa used to say.”

  She smiled and took a sip of water. “What good water. I haven’t had real well-water in a long time.” She looked out through the screens—at the pond, the road, the trees all around. “It’s like a painting. Where’s the ridge?”

  “Up behind us.”

  I knew what she was thinking and I didn’t want her to say it—don’t say it, don’t say it. Don’t tell me how you feel about Skip. I know how you feel about Skip. I can hear that little bit of amused irony in your voice. I know what you’re thinking. Be careful, don’t get hurt. Well, it’s my life and my hurt. And at first you liked him so much.

  “It’s funny,” she shook her head and put the glass down on a table, “I’d forgotten. Now it’s coming back.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything that happened that summer. I met your father on a farm that must be someplace near here, it’s hard to tell, the roads are different now. New Jersey was just farm country then, villages and farms. It was so rural, so green. Most of the roads were dirt, no big highways at all. It was before the war—1938. The farm was a dairy farm, not a commune.”

  “This isn’t really a commune.”

  “Well, whatever. That was a real farm, a working farm, and in the summer to make a little extra money, they took in boarders. People used to do that, you know. Whole families would come out from the city on a train and board at various farms in New Jersey. What a summer that was! Wonderful and strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “First of all because I met your father. That was kind of strange.” She laughed. “And then there was the situation in Europe. Hitler had annexed Austria and was looking more dangerous by the minute and out here, in all this peace and beautiful scenery, they had Nazi parades.”

  “Out here? You mean the farmers were Nazi sympathizers?”

  “Oh no, but some Nazis lived out here. They had a summer camp not far from here and on Sundays a number of Germans would come out from New York City on the train. They’d all march to the camp from the train station, the men in their uniforms, a good old German band. The people out here didn’t like it.”

  “They didn’t stop them?”

  “Wait, I’ve got it—that’s what your father and I argued about. He thought they should have stopped them, I said no.”

  “Freedom of Assembly?”

  “Good for you! Right! So they went on having their Nazi parades, but the local people still didn’t like it. They debated and debated, it went on all summer, all covered in detail in the local newspaper and talked about everywhere.”

  “What finally happened?”

  “You know, I don’t remember. Isn’t that odd? Eventually, of course, the war came.”

  “What was Dad doing out here?”

  She didn’t answer immediately and then she said, “Ransome Hartshorn! That was his name. Your father came out to the farm on weekends with the farmer’s son. He was a classmate at Columbia Medical College. Ransome Hartshorn. He was such a nice boy. He died in the war, in the South Pacific. Funny how clear it all seems and I didn’t put it together until just a minute ago.” Her face clouded over. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “First I forgot how we’d met and then in the next second I forget we’re getting divorced.” She made the wry face again and began fumbling in her big yellow straw handbag.

  I asked, “What were you doing on a farm anyway?”

  “What?” She blew her nose on a tissue and looked distracted. “Oh, I’d gone up for the summer. I’d been sick. With TB. I think I told you that, that I had TB when I was young. They sent me to a sanitorium for six months and I got better, and then I came out here to get plumped up. That’s what Alma called it. She was the farmer’s wife. A very nice woman.” She groped in her bag again and came up with a pack of Parliaments.

  “Oh great,” I said, “I thought you quit?”

  “I did.” She shrugged. “Oh well.” She lit one and sat back, and then said snappishly, “Well, I’m going through a bad time. This is just temporary.” She puffed aggressively and blew out smoke. “Anyway, I don’t inhale. Ransome Hartshorn! I haven’t thought of him in years. He had curly brown hair, but I liked your father better, I have no idea why. Now he’s dead.”

  “Who? Dad?”

  “Don’t I wish. No. I take that back. Don’t you people have ashtrays?”

  “Alice hates smokers so she hides all the ashtrays.”

  “Who’s Alice?”

  “One of the girls … women.”

  She nodded vaguely and then her face took on that peaked, anxious look. “My life’s been so busy I’ve completely forgotten what happened back then.” She bit her lip.

  I stood up. “Mom, here comes Alice. Let’s go for a walk.”

  But I had to introduce them—my mother waving her cigarette around like a baton and Alice like some overachieving goddess of nutrition, with her arms full of groceries from the Nature’s Bounty Health Food Store in the village.

  I walked my mother out to the car. At first, I’d taken the news of their divorce calmly—I hadn’t felt anything much except relief. But today I felt depressed: steamrolled.

  She got into the car and said thoughtfully, “Of course, my father was a lawyer. Did I ever mention that?”

  “I know, I know. A judge.”

  “I always thought you’d would make a good lawyer, and an excellent judge. Even when you were little you were so … fair. I remember you at five sitting in the sandbox with John and you were counting out those gumdrop coins you liked—one for John, one for you. Scrupulous! Elizabeth, keep in touch, will you? You have this peculiar way of isolating yourself. Your father needs you. He may seem strong to you, but he really does need you. He misses you.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “There isn’t another person, is there?”

  She sat up straight behind the steering wheel. Her chin went up and out. “You mean me or your father?”

  “Whoever.”

  “I haven’t really inquired.”

  “Well, is he … where is he?”

  She snapped, “In hell I hope.” And then she looked extremely demure and said, “At the Comstock Motel on West Main.”

  I nodded and bent my head to the open car window. We kissed. She smelled of face powder and Mitsouko, her favorite perfume. Just then Alice came out of the house with a large wicker basket and let herself into the garden. As the gate swung open and closed, its hinges gave a tortured drawn-out yowl, like the cry of a midnight cat.

  My mother raised her brows at me. “Pretty girl, Alice,” she said. She slipped on her black sunglasses and lowered her voice. “Now do be careful.” She meant about Skip, of course. There�
��s this strange thing with my mother—if she lets down her emotional guard she feels exposed and angry and next thing you know she’s letting you have it.

  She raised her hand and took her glasses off again and looked at me as if there was something else she wanted to say. Her blue eyes looked blurred and her lower lip trembled. Johnny, I thought, and I pressed my lips together and hardened my face—I didn’t want to hear it. And then she dropped her eyes, her mouth made a tight line, she pushed the sunglasses on and she backed the car around and out, carefully letting the rented maroon Chevy slide down the grade. I stood there watching her and at the bend in the road I waved and she tooted the car’s horn. A billowing cloud of reddish dust followed the car into the woods and then hung lazily upon the air before slowly falling to earth again.

  5.

  I went for a swim in the pond after my mother left, and then I read for a while, lying on the old wicker sofa of the summer parlor, eating pretzels out of the box, my head supported by three mildewed chintz cushions. I’d found an old edition of To the Lighthouse in the winter parlor and had started reading it again. I’d first read it for a college English class but I hadn’t liked it—the book made me uneasy. This edition, with its yellowed, delicately crumbling pages and sharp fungoid smell I liked better—it seemed itself to have come out of that very era. On the inside cover of the book, in elegant, spidery brown handwriting, was inscribed the name Doretta P. Garland, and the date May 22, 1931.

  I read for a while, and then closed my eyes; the sound of the sea leapt toward me from the page and I longed for Maine. A couple of summers when we were kids my parents had rented a cottage in Pleasant Point, Maine—near enough to my grandparents, but (on the other hand) far enough away for a little independence.

  I was eight and ten and twelve those summers and I think they were the happiest times we spent together as a family.

  It seemed to me now that part of the charm of those summers was the fact that my parents were happy there, too. Away from their jobs and responsibilities, they were like kids themselves. Together, the four of us sailed and went on hikes and picked blueberries. We played croquet and set up a badminton net on the front lawn of the cottage. We picked mussels, fished for mackerel, walked down the dirt road to Stu McGee’s old white house which was right on the waters of Pleasant Point Gut, and where, from his sagging dock, he sold lobsters for not very much money, and where his wife, Evie, sold doughnuts that she fried in an iron skillet right on top of her wood stove, also for not very much money. We bought their wares but always felt ashamed to be buying the lobster and doughnuts for so little.

  Those times when we lay on the stony beach or sat in front of the fire when the rains came, my parents would occasionally talk about themselves, what they did when they were small, what their parents were like, what their lives were like “back then,” family stories that fascinated me because “back then” seemed so irretrievably lost, and because at home in Comstock, with the busyness of our various lives, my parents seldom had time to talk so ruminatively and humorously and speculatively and wistfully about themselves. I don’t think I understood my mother at all until the summer I was eight. My father had always seemed more approachable, a big bear-hug-type dad, a professionally trained listener who could zero in uncannily when something was wrong. My mother was more driven—bright but brittle, a talker who was nevertheless not all that secure, not with that rooted, oak-tree-type massive security of my father’s. So that was the summer I got to know my mother, the day we rowed to Seal Rock, and we sat on the sunny rock frying in our bathing suits and I said to her, “Didn’t you used to come here with your mother?” And she said, “My mother died when I was twelve.” She looked the other way, out across the bay toward the two humpbacked green islands that guarded the channel entrance. I persisted. “What did she die of?” “She had meningitis.” “I thought that was your sister!” “My sister died of TB.” “TV?” “Tuberculosis.” “Gee, it must of been lonely.” “It was.”

  The clear blue air! The wide alarming sea (its horizon was curved—the shrouded edge of the world), the smell of mint that grew in the fields, the smell of blueberry pie baking in the tiny oven of the cottage’s stork-legged forty-year-old gas stove, the sound of the foghorn that blew at night (a deep melancholic and reassuring sound) and the fog itself that as the summer went on lifted later and later in the morning and came on earlier at night—the white curling secret fog lapping curiously at the window panes; the gentle lap lap lap of the water on the rocks, the early morning sound of the lobster fishermen setting their pots, and the dreadful bone-drenching storms, the howling winds, the pelting gales that could appear quite suddenly off the bay, with a wild maniacal tide roaring and leaping around the dock’s timbers as if to suck you in, as if to remind you how powerful and inexplicable were the forces of the natural world, a world in which you only lived and died, and your life was of no consequence or meaning or moment.

  Two car doors slammed. “Stinker!” I heard May call out, and laugh.

  “You drive pretty fast, little lady. Were you smokin’ somethin’, or just plain smokin’?”

  “You shouldn’t tailgate like that you know.”

  “And it’s such a pretty little tail.”

  “Ouch! Wayne, stop it.”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  “Wayne, don’t. You know how I have this thing about carrying on in public.”

  “Sweetie, there’s nobody here.”

  “That Liz is here.”

  “So what? She’s a big girl now, or so one would assume, since she’s no doubt been brought in to provide for Skip. And a good thing, too, in my opinion, or I’d have to lock you up. I’ve never understood what you women see in Skip.”

  “What do you see in Skip, Wayne?”

  “He’s not my lover, May. Not yet. Not unless you drive me to it.”

  “I mean as a friend, of course. What is it you see in Skip?”

  “C’mon, May. Guys don’t take each other that seriously.”

  “Bullshit! C’mon, Wayne. What is it? He’s smart, he’s easy to get along with, he’s on the right side of everything, but what it is, really?” May said something in a low voice and then she shrieked and then came the sound of an out-and-out chase.

  I peeled myself off the wicker sofa and went up to my third-floor bedroom. The room was as hot as Hades. Just standing in the doorway I began to sweat. Immediately, I felt a major headache coming on. I hadn’t liked what Wayne had said about me but it was true, wasn’t it, only there was something hard and careless in his tone, a carelessness that suggested I would get what I deserved, whatever that was.

  I went into the bathroom, filled the tub with cool water, stripped and got in. I continued reading while downstairs more of the group arrived. It was beginning to sound like a party. I got out of the tub, put on a yellow sundress and tied my hair back with a yellow ribbon. Len was at the kitchen sink when I came downstairs, chopping onion on the maple cutting board.

  “Need some help?” I asked.

  He looked up and frowned so that his black brows knit together. “No.”

  “Liz!” Wayne said, all smiles. He always smiled with his lips closed, ashamed, I guessed, of his crooked teeth. He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a Mickey Mouse glass in his hand. “Have some gin, have some tonic, we were just wondering where you were.”

  Liar, I thought coldly. “Where’s May?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Wayne said. “May is a law unto herself.”

  I turned toward Leonard. “Does anyone happen to know where Skip is? He said he’d be back early tonight.”

  “How the devil should I know?” Leonard snarled.

  “Art thou thy brother’s keeper?” Wayne asked. “Bad-tempered Len!” he said, beaming fondly as if bad temper were a charming foible. “Don’t let him intimidate you, Liz.”

  “He doesn’t,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Wayne said soothingly. “Good girl.” I was beginn
ing to want to punch him. “Now. How about one of these? Tonic? Gin? Both?”

  “Well, both,” I said.

  I took the drink he made for me and sat down facing the windows. Len came and stood in the doorway. He was drying his hands with a paper towel. “He’s setting something up,” he said in his habitual way, in my direction but past me, as if I were actually floating around in the air outside the window screens.

  “What?” I said.

  “Skip’s setting some work up.”

  “I thought he was doing the newspaper,” I said.

  “Work that pays,” Len said flatly.

  “You mean as a lawyer?”

  “More or less,” he said and went back into the kitchen. Iron clanged against the stove top. In a moment I heard oil sizzling and then I smelled garlic frying.

  “Why would he do that if he’s already doing the newspaper?” I asked.

  “Ah, well,” Wayne said. “You get to a certain age, there are imminent responsibilities. Reading this?” He leaned forward and picked up my novel from the table.

  “Rereading it. Have you read it?”

  “I don’t read novels by women.”

  I stared. “Why not?”

  “They are boring.”

  “Maybe it’s in your point of view.”

  “Do I have a point of view?”

  “Of course you do, it’s obvious. Women are for fucking.”

  Wayne silently smiled. I felt from the direction of the kitchen an intense listening silence. I put my drink down on a little tilted table—let him clean it up if it spilled—and went out the dining porch door that led to the exterior staircase. I thought of all the dumb men I’d met and treated at least with courtesy. There is a certain kind of man who has to make sure every woman he meets knows her place, which is—potentially, at least—in bed, under him.

  I clumped down the stairs and took the dirt road that led north, the “tee” of the dirt driveway. I stopped once and looked back up at the house and saw Leonard—his white shirt, his gray pants—standing at the screen with his hands stuck into his back pockets. He abruptly turned away and I, too, turned away and went marching down the road.